In this paper, the miniaturized electronically steerable parasitic array radiator (ESPAR) antenna is presented. The size reduction was obtained by embedding its active and passive elements in polylactic acid (PLA) plastic material commonly used in low-cost 3D printing. The influence of 3D printing process imperfections on the ESPAR antenna design is investigated and a simple yet effective method to compensate them has been proposed....

In this paper, influence of dielectric overlay permittivity on miniaturized ESPAR antenna parameters is presented. ESPAR antenna is a low-cost and energy-efficient way to implement beam steering capability to a node and improve network performance. The antenna size reduction is obtained by embedding its active and passive elements in ABS based materials of relative permittivity equal to 4, 5.5 and 7.5 in order to achieve network...

A new compact ESPAR antenna is investigated in this paper. The proposed antenna has 12 directional radiation patterns based on 12 passive elements and can be successfully used in Wireless Sensor Network applications. In proposed antenna design, the possibilities of 3D printing were used to implement a dielectric miniaturization overlay that allowed for reducing antenna occupied area by almost 60% and antenna profile by 27% in comparison...